All you need to know about Hybrid Auditing in SharePoint 2016

Summary: This blog post will show you how to configure Hybrid Auditing in SharePoint 2016. It will also point out some considerations when deploying this new feature.
Microsoft released a new hybrid feature for SharePoint 2016: Hybrid Auditing. This feature will automatically upload your on-premises user activity logs to Office 365, so administrators can generate reports for users across SharePoint on-premises and Office 365.

* Note: This feature is still in preview! The configuration and capabilities might change in the future.

Verify your configuration

If you want to verify that the configuration was successful, here are some tips:

Get Microsoft SharePoint Insights configuration
If you want to make sure that you Hybrid Auditing configuration was done correctly, you can use the following PowerShell cmdlet to see the current configuration:

Get-SPInsightsConfig

This will show you the current configuration for your Hybrid Auditing feature. This might also help you to find any issues you’re facing.

Configure usage and health data collection
In Central Administration, under Monitoring -> Configure usage and health data collection make sure “Enable usage data collection” is checked.
For now I am not sure which checkboxes are required for the hybrid functionality, but these are the ones I have active at the moment.

Troubleshooting

After configuring Hybrid Auditing, I found that I wasn’t getting any on-premises results from the Office 365 Security & Compliance center.
Here you can find some issues that I ran in to and the solution for these issues.

Failed to start a service (Microsoft SharePoint Insights service) that is needed for Hybrid Auditing (Preview) scenario

After running the Hybrid picker I would get this error. It seems that there is a time-out when the picker tries to stop and start the Microsoft SharePoint Insights service. To get around this error, make sure the Microsoft SharePoint Insights service is started from the Services on Server or Services in Farm menu in Central Administration.

I have changed my log location in my on-premises farm
Whenever you change your log location, this change is not automatically picked up by the Microsoft SharePoint Insights service.
Instead, you should run the Hybrid Picker again, then restart the Microsoft SharePoint Insights service from Central Administration.
Your logs will appear in Office 365 after performing these steps.

During my testing, I found that the user mapping isn’t done correctly. As this is a preview feature, I am hoping this will be resolved when the feature will be GA.

I have a user named Kim Akers. In Active Directory, this user is known as:

Userprincipalname: kimakers@sharepointrelated.com

User logon name (pre-Windows 2000): sprelated\kimakers

Kim works in both SharePoint 2016 (on-premises) and SharePoint Online.
Opening the Security & Compliance Center in the Office 365 Admin Portal, the “Users” field automatically resolves “Kim” as “Kim Akers”. See the screenshot below as a reference:

The results coming back for this search only show the SharePoint Online activities for Kim.
This is because the results for the on-premises activities for Kim are actually displayed under the user sprelated\kimakers.

Until now, I haven’t found a way to find results for on-premises users directly. The only way to find on-premises activities is to leave the “Users” field empty. This means you will get all results, without any user filter. This makes it hard to find the activities for on-premises users.

If you have any trouble configuring Hybrid Auditing, contact me on Twitter or LinkedIn and I will help wherever I can.

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2 thoughts on “All you need to know about Hybrid Auditing in SharePoint 2016”

Nico, to solve the matching problem, have you tried adjusting the mapping of the UPA Claim User Identifier property? The UPN’s of the cloud identities may not match your on-premises ones. There may be a solution here in adjusting the mapping of the Claim User Identifier to changed from sAMAccountName to userPrincipalName or mail.

I am trying to anticipate hybrid issues for a scenario where the on-premises UPN is not what is mapped into AAD using AAD Connect…would be happy to share notes.

Hi, I haven’t tried this yet because Microsoft told me this is a known issue that is a top priority for them.
They will fix it in the Office 365 side so we won’t have to do anything after the fix has been applied by Microsoft.